The two leaders of an Alsace-based automotive components company, also brothers, were sentenced this Tuesday in Paris to six and eight months in prison for embezzling around 200,000 euros. These facts were revealed in 2016 in the Panama Papers.
Before the 32nd chamber of the judicial court, the two brothers admitted having embezzled 200,000 euros, as early as 2002 and for about ten years, via a Hong Kong company, Trade Group Limited, attached to personal bank accounts that had not been declared to the authorities. French tax authorities. This undeclared money enabled them to pay for entertainment with bank cards.
The National Financial Prosecutor’s Office was interested in this Alsatian company in 2016, after an article in the newspaper Rue89 Strasbourg which reported on the revelations of the international consortium of investigative journalists on the famous “Panama Papers”. Based on millions of documents from a Panamanian law firm, the consortium had revealed the existence of thousands of hidden assets of the firm’s clients, including a number of public figures.
After these revelations, the PNF had therefore opened an investigation entrusted to the national brigade for the repression of fiscal delinquency concerning this Alsatian company.
During the trial, the prosecutor François-Xavier Dulin stressed that the two brothers “fully cooperated” during the investigations. In addition to their prison sentences, the two business leaders were sentenced for aggravated abuse of corporate assets and tax evasion to a fine of 25,000 euros each.